Column: Chris Laidlaw

Cup machismo might be no match for Y2K


Here they come again, dammit. The French don't seem to be content with giving us a black eye in the Rugby World Cup. They now have the effrontery to imagine that they have a rough show of lifting the America's Cup as well.

Everybody in the know, of course, says that the French boat hasn't really got a hope. They may have sneaked into the semifinals of the seemingly interminable Louis Vuitton Cup but that has largely been as a result of sundry sinkings, gear failure and other assorted maritime disasters befalling the other syndicates.

But wasn't that how the French team sneaked into the semifinals of the World Cup? Surely it couldn't happen to us again? Who needs this bloody Cup the most, after all? France or New Zealand? No contest.

If you accept that the French aren't the big worry, the question is, who is? The Young America challenge has finally hit the rocks, provoking much wailing and sorrow in the leafy suburbs of Westchester County in New York.

Now that the almost obscene amounts of money raised from among the idle rich of the New York Yacht Club to send two boats and 20 containers of high-technology equipment to Auckland to bring the Auld Mug back to its rightful place in the club's trophy room has been sucked down into the Hauraki Gulf, the main threat to Sir Peter Blake's outfit seems to have been removed.

No one seemed too upset at New York's demise, not even one of their former favourite sons, Dennis Conner. At least the big man is still in the competition with his Stars & Stripes team.

Among the earnest collection of non-personalities who are running all the other challenger syndicates, Conner stands out as a unique individual; someone who knows how to stand on New Zealand toes and bring out the best in our yachtsmen. All the others are just an identical blur so far as we landlubbers are concerned.

The competition is lumbering towards the semifinals and hoovering large sums of money from the challengers - which of course was the whole object of the exercise in the first place - as it goes.

There has hardly been a mention of Team New Zealand. For all we know, they might be living it up at Club Med rather than training.

At the rate things are going there may not be any challengers left with enough equipment to actually take the water in the Cup itself. Conventional wisdom has it that the experience of a long and gruelling elimination round is an ideal platform to take on the holders who have been idling around the harbour chasing their own shadow for a couple of months.

That's not much compensation, however, if your boat is a patchwork quilt of repairs held together with glue and still functioning largely on force of habit.

And so we wait, patiently and faintly bemused by it all, for the real stuff to get going. After all the preliminaries and the countless millions of dollars pumped into this monumental test of maritime machismo, wouldn't it be terrible if the Y2K bug struck the whole computerised extravaganza down.

Now there's a thought. If Team New Zealand start falling behind, surely it's not beyond the resources of our homegrown software experts to invoke an irrevocable computer system failure. And why not? It's no more reprehensible than racing a catamaran against a maxi.